getting to a new normal

The global pandemic has been a wake up call and an opportunity. It has shocked our market economy and society. Over the past two decades we have seen many experiments and movements toward a more equitable, sustainable way of living on this planet. We have made the rules for how we are governed and how the economy works. We can change them. We cannot change how the planet’s environment works. We cannot change the laws of physics. We cannot change how the SARS CoV-2 virus acts, as much as we would like to.

As individuals, there is one thing we all can do, without anybody’s permission. We can become better learners. We can connect to diverse sources of knowledge and people with different experiences. We can build powerful knowledge networks to co-create knowledge and share it. We can engage with our communities and while learning ourselves we can help make them smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions.

Our future is beyond our institutions and markets, even though each will continue to have a role in a networked society. Our future is in a connected, egalitarian global community — inclusive, diverse, and meta-modern.

We start by connecting and learning and never stopping. This is perpetual beta — always willing to learn more and to change our minds.

How can we listen to tomorrow if we have yet to clarify what belongs to yesterday? We don’t just need new maps that order the world in the same old ways. New vision is required. New ontologies reshape the map, and reshape us.
So we should listen to the future.
Whose voices do we hear? [Ursula] Le Guin writes, “which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent — the dead, or the unborn?”
To listen, we must first be present. —Meta, Modern 2020-05-20

As we enter the third year of a global pandemic we are seeing the forces of disease, climate change, and political polarization combine and batter our markets and institutions. It will only be as a global networked society that we will be able to address these forces.

Welcome to life in perpetual beta, where work is learning, and learning is the work.

More — Perpetual Beta 2022